The Tragic Case of Donald Trump

Trump is not only the worst president in U.S. history, he is arguably the most transparent one as well. If you don't know why he acts the way he does by now, you either haven't been paying attention, or, more seriously, you are inclined to believe that the writing on his identity's wall tends to lead to an heroic interpretation, rather than to a clinical one.

The purpose of this article is not only to explain why Trump acts the way he does, but also to indicate why his personality disorder is so dangerous to the well-being of the United States and to the entire world. I will illustrate this with the help of an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's latest and last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published a few months after the great scientist's death in March 2018, at the age of seventy-six. I will address Trump's personality-disorder first.

1. The Malignant Narcissist

All non-partisan observers should know by now that Trump is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. Morality for him is that which supports him; immorality for him is any form of opposition--What can be more amoral than that? The examples are legion! One of the latest is his criticism of Mark Hertling, the Navy Seal who was instrumental in capturing Saddam Hussein and killing Osama bin Laden. The retired admiral took Trump to task for his attacks on the press. When Chris Wallace of Fox News asked for a comment on Hertling's criticism, Trump interrupted and stated that the admiral was a Clinton and Obama supporter. (An accusation which the admiral subsequently vehemently denied). For Trump, the accusation of being a Clinton or Obama supporter nullifies the objectivity of whatever is said; whatever opponents say is by definition immoral, according to his internal, very limited dictionary. 

If you would prefer a clinical reason that explains Trump's behavior rather that an ethical one, it is malignant narcissism, an extreme form of vanity. Trump lives on praise as a vampire lives on blood; without it he becomes desiccated, like a grape after a  week in a desert.

Because he lacks a center, he must imagine himself to be the center of the universe. Because he knows so little, he pretends to know everything in order to salvage his precarious equilibrium. If deep down in his psyche he believes that he is worthless--this is why narcissists need constant praise--he surely knows how to cover up his lack of character with his characteristic bragging. "How would you grade your presidency so far?" Trump was asked in a recent interview. "A+," he replied; "Can I go higher than that?" He has been saying such ridiculous things for so long that
one isn't sure if he really believes the lies he tells. I think he does, which is sad and scary--Trump, after all, is the most powerful person in the world. He does not have the right stuff, however; we know it, and deep down there he knows it as well.

2. The Ignorant Narcissist

Trump claims that he is a "very stable genius," and that he knows "all the words," while in reality he is profoundly ignorant of that which one needs to know in order to govern, and cannot even put a decent sentence together. His tragedy, which has become ours, is a toxic combination of ignorance and inability to learn. Learning involves, among other things, humility and the ability to listen. Trump's lack of both of these qualities astounds. How can you learn if you are driven to pretend that you are smarter than everyone else and know all the answers already? One of his former instructors at the Wharton School of Business declared that Trump was a terrible student for this very reason.

Trump's inability to learn, his delusion that he knows all the answers, and his impulsiveness in making decisions without expert input are very dangerous flaws indeed. One of many examples follows. Trump discovered that South Korea has a trade surplus with the United States. Impulsively, he decided to pull out troops from South Korea and transfer missile defenses to Oregon. This would be an unmitigated disaster, since South Korea's proximity to "Little Rocket Man" means that a missile launched at the United States would be detected much earlier, a fact of crucial importance. Trump apparently directed his staff to have a letter ready for his signature, a letter informing the South Koreans that the United States was withdrawing from its military commitments. A patriotic aide intercepted the letter; Trump subsequently forgot about it. Whew! (The source of this anecdote is Bob Woodward's book, Fear, which chronicles the truly fearsome and amoralTrumpian chaos).

Why is he, in addition to his narcissism, so ignorant? He doesn't read. Kelly, the Secretary of Defense, considers Trump to be at the level of a fifth-grader. If he doesn't read, and he apparently doesn't, it is far worse than that. Aides apparently have to have texts illustrated with pictures, so that the president can grasp what is going on in informative meetings. Trump is known to "keep up" with the news by watching television, not by reading. This is truly unprecedented.

How does a refusal or inability to read affect a human being's ability to learn? For this, we turn to a passage from Steven Hawking's last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, (Bantam Books, 2018):

Trump ridiculously claims that  he is “a very stable genius”—if he were, he wouldn’t have to make such outlandish claims. Stephen Hawking lacked the narcissism to boast, nor did he need to—his genius was apparent to all. The great scientist who, amazingly, lasted over half a century after receiving a diagnosis of a malady which usually proves fatal within a few years, unfortunately died in March of this year, 2018, at the age of seventy-six, “a very stable genius,” despite his crippling handicap, to the very end of his life. Not only characterized by stability, his genius, as one might expect from a scientist, was also informed by rationality and by a progressive stance as well. He was thus in vehement opposition to the inane populism of Donald Trump. 

What follows is a quote from Hawkings's book:

The DNA in a human egg or sperm contains three billion base pairs of nucleic acids...the total amount of useful information in our genes is probably something like a hundred million bits...By contrast, a paperback novel might contain two million bits of information. Therefore, a human is equivalent to about fifty Harry Potter books, and a major modern national library can contain about five million books--or about ten trillion bits. The amount of information handed down in books or via the internet is 100,000 times as much as there is in DNA.


                                         --pages 76-


What we quoted from his book might not have been written with Trump in mind, but it exposes very well the current American—and world—predicament. Trump isn’t able and isn’t even willing to learn from experts, since he doesn’t read and suffers from a pathology that makes him imagine that he knows all the answers already—a truly toxic combination!

A few pages further on, Hawking writes: 

An even greater limitation (the first arising from specialization in narrower and narrower fields due exponential growth of knowledge) and danger for future generations
is that we still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days.
                                     
                                                     --page 80

Trump’s aggression and greed are not tempered by wisdom, since he has no access to the wise. Trump’s hates and delusions are not tempered by the light of experience either; his illness prevents him from seeing light in the world, since he lives in his own world, which is dark. (He lives in a primitive world of nitbits, as it were). Trump is thus not merely a narcissist, but a Neolithic Narcissist; we’ve got a caveman in the White House and all, to put it mildly, isn’t well.

Favorite Poems, Volume lll: "Death is Coming," by Heinrich Heine

Death is coming--Time to depart;

time to confess what foolish pride

till now did not let me confide:

for you was each beat of my heart!

The coffin's ready. Slowly I'll sink

into the earth. Peace I shall have--

But you, but you, Maria, you will think

of me often and weep beside my grave.

You wring your lovely hands so sadly--

Oh, be consoled! It is our fate,

our human fate, what's  good and great

and lovely ends--and ends badly.

Heinrich Heine

--Translated from the German

by Thomas Dorsett

Es kommt der Tod

Es kommt der Tod--jetzt will ich sagen,
Was zu verschweigen ewiglich
Mein Stolz gebot: für dich, für dich,
Es hat mein Herz für dich geschlagen!

Der Sarg ist fertig, sie vesenken
Mich in die Gruft. da hab ich Ruh,
Doch du, doch du, Maria, du
Wirst weinen oft und mein gendenken.

Du ringst sogar die schönen Hände--
O tröste dich--Das ist das Los,
Das Menschenlos--was gut und gross
Und schön, das nimmt ein schlechtes Ende.

                          --Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was a major German poet of the nineteenth century. His poems, especially the early ones, celebrate love and rejection with consummate skill. He also wrote several notable ballads, including the famous Lorelei. He was politically involved as well, and knew Karl Marx; he was, as one might suspect,  socially progressive, but did not advocate communism. He moved to France in his thirties and remained there for the rest of his life. He visited Germany on occasion; toward the end of his life, however, he was banned from has native land due to his political views.

Important for the poem discussed here is his liaison with Crescence Eugénie Mirat, a shopgirl whom he met in 1834 when the former was nineteen. She was uneducated, sometimes embarrassingly so, a periodic embarrassment to Heine's friends and acquaintances; the couple quarreled frequently, but remained committed to each other. Heine, who was Jewish, married Crescence, who was Catholic, in 1841.

In 1848, Heine who had been ill, collapsed. He had become paralyzed, perhaps from venereal disease, perhaps from multiple sclerosis. He became bedridden, confined to his 'mattress grave' until his death a decade later. His wife, whom he called 'Mathilde', the 'Maria' of the poem, was his faithful nurse until his death.

Analysis

This poem was found in the poet's legacy. Its heartfelt directness is a convincing fulfillment of Beethoven's dedication to his Missa Solemnis: Vom Herzen; möge es wieder zum Herzen gehen--"From my heart--may it reach yours as well."

Heine had led a full life until the time of his paralysis; his personality was animated more by a joie de vivre quality, rather than by an introverted gloominess, examples of which abound in German Romantic poetry. He writes about death here only because he was, well, dying. Unlike many of his previous poems, there is no ironic detachment; every word comes from direct experience. This adds to the emotional impact of the poem; it is a grand exception to Wilde's dictum that all bad poetry is sincere--for this is indeed a great poem.

In the first three lines, Heine regrets that he had not confessed his love earlier. Mathilde--whose name was changed to the more euphonious Maria in the poem--was, after all, very ignorant. (On a visit to Germany, Mathilde made a disastrous impression on Heine's family). He loved her, but his pride (and occasional embarrassment) forbade him from expressing that love as much as he would have liked.

The poem is not bitter: one of its many strengths lies in the fact that Heine has accepted death and does his best to console his wife, who will miss him greatly.

For me, the masterful stroke of this poem comes at the end. It is, as one might suspect, much more powerful in the original German:

O tröste dich! Es ist das Los,

das Menschenlos, was gut und gross

und schön--das nimmt ein schlechtes Ende.

The beauty and wonder of life is depicted with the long vowels of gut (good), gross (great) and especially schön (beautiful)--all this is dashed by death, and, as the German has it, "takes a bad end." What I love about this phrase is its understatement: the last five words must be read more rapidly and perhaps, sotto voce. This simple statement, which addresses the main theme of the poem, namely that death is inevitable, has all the more impact due to its lack of elaboration. Only true poets can accomplish a feat like that.

We all know the truth of the last three lines. Human beings, all of whom are great but some of whom are truly great, must die, sometimes die at the height of their powers. The inexorability of death and the sorrow it unleashes is indeed our human fate; no one mourns the passing of  bacteria, for instance, which were the only form of life on earth for three and half billion years. The utter devastation and chaos of  annihilation reminds me of one of Emily Dickinson's poems about the dying process, "The Last Night She Lived".  She finishes the poem after the protagonist's demise with these harrowing lines: "And then an awful leisure was/ Belief to regulate."

We all would like to die in accord with a Spanish proverb, namely, that when one is born, one cries and everyone smiles; when one dies after a full life, however, the opposite is true: one smiles while everyone cries.  Let's hope that this is what happened in Heine's last moments. 

Yes, life doesn't end the way we would like. Yes, "death is (indeed)  coming," whether we like it or not. Yet if we lead a good life--as Heine did--and accept the inevitable, we can continue to console and be consoled until our last breath. That's what Heine has outlined in this brilliant poem. Read it carefully. The implication is that love and wisdom can still fulfill, even at the point of death. That is no small consolation.

What Islam Means to Me (A Poem)

l.

Responding to a current event, I am posting a poem I wrote shortly after the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, which occurred on March 2, 2011 in Pakistan. From 2008 until his death, Bhatti, a Christian and the only non-Muslim in the parliament, was the Minister of Minorities Affairs. He struggled to ease the burdens of the "oppressed, downtrodden and the marginalized," struggling "for human equality, social justice and the uplift and empowerment of religious minorities' communities" in Pakistan. He strove to repeal Pakistan's blasphemy law, which includes the sentence of capital punishment for those who "blaspheme" the Prophet's honor. For this reason he was assassinated, a murder in cold blood which received widespread support throughout the country.

Bhatti wasn't the only major figure assassinated for opposition to the blasphemy law. The governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, was gunned down by his own bodyguard in January, 2011; the public cheered.

A few months before Bhatti  was killed, Asia Bibi, a Punjabi Christian, was accused of blasphemy--just what she said is uncertain--and sentenced to death. (Bhatti defended her; this is why he was murdered.) She remained in solitary confinement until last month, when the Pakistani Supreme Court righted a grievous wrong and pardoned her.

Here is a photo of the reaction many Pakistanis had:

Many demand that she be hanged. Having received numerous death threats, several of those who publicly defended her have already fled the country.

2.

Pakistani extremists remind me of the current deterioration of social comity in the United Sates since the election of Donald Trump. First, while the more benign cries of "Lock her up!" may be considered to originate, as it were, just several steps beyond the mouth of the Inferno, while "Hang her!" is a cry heard, as it were again, in the belly of Hell, the former is located on a path which leads directly to the latter. It certainly can happen here if that path is followed farther. There is no doubt in my mind that Trump's bigotry and the recent acts of deplorable violence in the United States are connected. The Bhatti assassination demonstrates where hate leads if it remains unchecked. It is a warning that must be heeded. 

Second, I am reminded that America is not Pakistan. One of the glories of our country is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of speech. The amendment is threatened, but still very much remains a bulwark of the Republic. Our diversity is also a blessing. Sometimes I think that the partition of the Indian subcontinent was similar to the gerrymandering that plagues American democracy. Muslims went to Pakistan, Hindus remained in India; they no longer had to talk to each other and get along, just as a representative in an American gerrymandered district needn't bother to address the concerns of those on the other side of the political divide in order to get elected. This is especially applicable to Pakistan, since India has a large Muslim minority.

Third, and most important here, I consider the Pakistani fanatics to be in opposition to the true spirit of Islam. As I stated in a previous essay, judging religions should not be a popularity contest; one should judge religions at their best. In literature, for instance, Shakespeare should come first to mind rather than poetasters. Islam has produced great and wise thinkers over the ages, and has inspired millions to lead better lives, including those alive today. I recall the recent aid offered by American Muslims to victims of the horrible Tree of Life synagogue massacre; these Muslims, in their words, wished to conquer evil with good.  

Furthermore, the tolerance and loving kindness characteristic of the Sufi branch of Islam is an inspiration  for us all. (In the spirit of Sufism, I compose the following sentence: If a Hindu abuses a Muslim in any way, he is no Hindu; if a Muslim abuses a Hindu in any way, he is no Muslim; true Muslims and true Hindus are guided by love, wisdom and tolerance. This principle applies to all faiths and to those without any specific faith as well). 

Granted there is more extremism in Islam today than, say, in Christianity; I think this is largely due, however, to the miserable politics in many Islamic countries, which has produced a large number of underemployed, undereducated, and relatively poor young, angry men--a toxic combination. Another factor is that secularism is much more prevalent in Western countries--in most of them, at least! I

n general, people who are unhappy tend to hate, no matter the religion; people who are happy tend to practice loving kindness, no matter the religion. It's as simple and complex as that. 

Human beings can become better through the practice of Islam, there is no doubt about that. 

3.

Words! Words! Words! Time, at last! for a poem.

What Islam Means To Me

In memoriam: S.B., assassinated by extremists

Shahbaz Bhatti worked very quietly.

He knew that to be a non-Muslim in modern Pakistan

is like being black in Georgia in 1921--

Worse than that, being a Christian cabinet minister

made him vulnerable as an “uppity” judge

during Reconstruction. He had had one of five seats

reserved for minorities--Getting paid for tolerance

in this world (he knew it) almost never lasts.

His crime against non-humanity was fighting to repeal

the blasphemy law--Truth is, if we all had 

to die for harrowing the sacred, everyone,

including grandmas in Kansas, wouldn’t survive.

Zia-ul-Haq modified the heinous 1970s law

by making it worse for the usual reason,

to cover up blasphemous failures of power--

This cannot last forever. Decency tells me

people like you, Shahbaz Bhatti, will increase--

(Despite fear for us, half in heaven's image, the other

half in hell's ferocious, self-righteous beast’s)

Peace

Old Yet Optimistic

Compared to the number of bones
supporting lithe tissues and flesh,
the number of atoms in a half-empty
glass of water might as well be infinite.
So why should it shame me if mine isn't full?

Subtracting an almost infinity from two
still leaves me with more than I need,
just as the full glass would: for a man
whose response to the cosmos is ah! one
minim of rain on his tongue is enough.


--Thomas Dorsett
first appeared in bluestem, April 2018


Commentary

Philip Roth said old age is not a battle, old age is a massacre. There is some truth to this, but only some. I think I got a better perspective on aging from my septuagenarian  friend, Cris: when I asked him whether he feared growing old(er), "No," he replied, "life is a sacred journey, every part of it." This reminded me of a Spanish adage which states that when you are born you cry while everyone else smiles; when you die, however, you should be smiling while everyone else cries. 

This poem indicates why many of us who are old, despite our decreasing vision and mobility, are surprisingly happier: we are wiser. Less egotistical, more empathetic.  

The poem's imagery of the invisible world of innumerable individual atoms suggests a consciousness that is aware of more than what can be visualized, that is, a cosmic consciousness, aware of the connectivity of all things. Such awareness tends to increase with age, and when it does, it invariably delights. 

In the last stanza, "Subtracting an almost infinity from two" refers to the almost infinity (from a human perspective) of atoms in a half-full glass of water compared to the almost infinity in a full glass.

"What is a good day now that you're old?" a young child asked my aged stepfather, long ago. "When you wake up and joyfully discover that you're still breathing!" Little things mean  a lot to those who age well, while a lot of things mean little to those who don't.

One evening, an even longer time ago, an old poet, albeit younger then than I am today, told me that he had become  satisfied with just a few drops of syrup on his pancake--yes, one minim of rain on the tongue is enough!

Even Weinbergs Nod

Steven Weinberg is arguably the preeminent theoretical physicist alive today, and that, in the present age of remarkable progress in that field, says a lot. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow, for their work which unites two of the four elementary forces in the universe, the electromagnatic and the weak forces, a significant step on the theoretical journey toward a theory of everything.

(The unification of these two forces with the strong force is beyond experimental capabilities at the present time, and the unification of these three with gravity is probably beyond earth-bound experimentation forever. The only theoretical framework that unites all four is the so-called M-theory, which, for the time being, remains exactly that, a theory).

Steven Weinberg, to put it mildly, is no fool. Thomas Dorsett, however, occasionally comes close to that appellation; not very bright, he knows his place. It would be presumptuous of him to criticize Weinberg, so he requests his inner core, Ramanatom, the, figuratively speaking, impersonal personal inner core of us all, to speak whole truths to half-truths.

The title of this essay, Even Weinbergs Nod, is based on the ancient proverb, Even Homer Nods, meaning even geniuses goof up occasionally. Ramanatom will now discuss two famous philosophical quotes of Weinberg that, according to Dorsett as well as to HimHerIt, are light-years off the mark.

First Quote: The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless...The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Did you really expect to see a Smiley Face beyond Arcturus, Mr. Weinberg?

The quote is from Steven Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, which first appeared in 1977 and was updated in 1993. (Books on physics need to be updated frequently, since there is so much progress being made. Most valuable popular books on cosmology antedate the discovery of the Higgs boson and the graviton, for instance). It is a fascinating book, one that Thomas Dorsett read with interest a few years after it appeared. (It has remained in his basement for many, many minutes--a long time, at least in comparison with a human lifespan--and will be dusted off and reread, if found).

It is difficult to argue with a genius. Ramanatom, however, effortlessly brushes the first quote into the dustpan of inner history.

Repeatedly trying to find something that's not there while time after time expecting a different result is farcical indeed. The Kingdom of God is within you, said a wise man long ago. He was right. Meaning is not found in outer space, but in inner space.

The condign response to the unfathomable is awe, wonder, fascination, hardly pointless reactions. It is indeed wondrous that the cosmos is so vast; Dorsett has read that if the visible universe were reduced to the size of an atom, the actual universe would be larger than the visible one!  Does that make consciousness any less wondrous? I think not, for consciousness is primary. As the great sage Ramana Maharshi pointed out, consciousness plus science equals science; stones, as far as we can tell, are oblivious to the latest finding from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

Yes, the universe is large, but consciousness, which contains science and is more than science, is in a very real sense even larger. The near infinities of science fit nicely, as it were, between the ears. It fits nowhere else.

Searching for meaning in the cosmos is like the proverbial thirsty fish searching for water while swimming in it.

Tragedy is indeed part of the human condition; the best tragedies, however, are also cathartic. Physics is what lifts human life above the level of farce? No, Mr. Weinberg, life even without physics is no farce.

You are not going to find a version of the Nicomachean Ethics by analyzing nebulae. You will find the source of morality in only one place: in naught "but (in the) internal difference, where the meanings are," (Emily Dickinson).

Transcending--while not destroying--the phenomenal (s)elf by acts of love of wisdom is not pointless. An unobserved electron is pointless, not you or I.

Second Quote: Frederick Douglas told in his Narrative how  his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil--that takes religion.

Ramanatom is going to let Thomas Dorsett field this one, it's that easy.

This quote might seem reasonable to some, but it is very wrong, just as the Newtonian belief, which still seems correct to some,  that inches and seconds are absolutes, the relativity of which has been proven beyond doubt by Einstein.

Replace "religion" with fanaticism, fascism, greed, hate, or delusion and the quote would make sense. Need I mention the horrors caused by Mao and Stalin, who were both avowed atheists? What about Hitler? He was ready to hang priests who disobeyed him; far worse was his persecution of the Jews, hardly the policy of a man who was even remotely religious.

Perhaps Mr. Weinberg is confusing religion with various types of fundamentalism. As a Jew, for instance, I would hardly recommend a fellow Jew to request a cup of sugar from an Ayatollah Khomeini. Any version of 'hate your neighbor and idolize yourself' is hardly what religion is about.

What is it about? According to Max Müller, the great philologist of the nineteenth century, the root of religion, the Latin religio, means nothing more than "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety." Close, but I think the Latin comes closer: religio, to reconnect, seems to me to denote a desire to reconnect with truth. This truth, the source of morality and of deepening wonder--Gandhi referred to it as satyagraha while Martin Luther King referred to it as soul force--can be viewed theistically or non-theistically. Something found inside oneself can be designated as one's God, for as Paul Tillich taught us, God is whatever one considers to be one's ultimate concern. I must admit I am fonder of the Eastern approach, where one finds a great Silence within oneself, a Silence that bids us to accept life as it is, to accept ourselves as we are, and to strive to do good, and has no need of talk about God. 

I also contend that after the Enlightenment, it is impossible for a reasonable person to interpret any example of mythology, however revered, literally. No, I do not find the universe smiling at us in the form, as it were, of a twinkling star; we should be beyond that by now.

One of the best formulations of the essence of religion was stated long ago by Hillel: don't do anything to another that you wouldn't like to be done to yourself. This is the essence of the Torah; all the rest is commentary.

Did  Frederick Douglas's master follow this form of the Golden Rule? The command to love our neighbor as ourselves is found in the Torah as well as in the Old Testament. The talmudic interpretation is very clear: included within the definition of "neighbor" is the stranger, the foreigner. The command is thus beyond race, gender or status; it transcends all these categories. Did Mark Twain's mother follow the advice of truth, heard by her inner ears, despite what her outer ears heard in church?

What about Gandhi, what about Martin Luther King, what about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel--What about good God- or good Silence-fearing people everywhere? You really nodded on this one Mr. Weinberg!

That crimes against humanity can be done in the name of religion is, of course, beyond all doubt. But as Calvin taught, the mind is a factory of idols. The degree that greed, hate and delusion can trump their opposites while even sometimes intensifying the self-righteousness of the greedy, hateful and delusioned is equally beyond all doubt. 

I am a poet. When I think of poetry I think of Shakespeare, not of Crabs Johnson, the fictive poet laureate of Ellicott City, Maryland. Similarly, when I think of religion, I think of truly great religious men and women, who reconnected with truth and acted accordingly, not of Pat Robinson nor of Franklin Graham, who, it seems to me, worship delusion rather than truth. If, among a hundred poems, one is found to be outstanding, shouldn't one focus on that?

As I was once fond of saying, a good guru is hard to find, you always get the other kind. Does that mean there are no teachers of wisdom? That humankind has sunk so far into the valley of death does not mean that one can't look up and start climbing.

The misuse of religion, like the misuse of politics, does not mean that politics and religion are not essential or basically good. We cannot get by without them. When rooted in a form of the Golden Rule, both of these human endeavors--they are basically one--are what (almost) guarantees that the long arc of history tends toward righteousness.

You certainly deserved the Nobel Prize for physics, Mr. Weinberg. My response to your achievements in that field is a very humble Wow! My response to your views on religion, is, however, Oh, come now! You should know better.

I repeat: you really nodded on this one, Mr. Weinberg!